Culture

Fate has not dealt kindly with Sir John Everett Millais (1829–96). For those who are not enthusiasts of the Pre-Raphaelites, this founding member of the Brotherhood tends to be categorised as the one who ‘went populist’ with such all-too-memorable scenes as ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ (now in the Tate) and the notorious Pears Soap advert ‘Bubbles’. Or, if your mnemonic centres function best through the stimulant of scandal, you may recall that it was Millais who stole Ruskin’s wife Effie (Euphemia Gray, who modelled for his justly famous painting ‘Ophelia’), and duly wed her after her marriage to the famous art critic was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation.

While Rover sank (it was warned, twice, in this column), another car was launched, in Venice. An amphibian? No, a Bentley. Perhaps because it rarely advertises, Bentley’s car launches are like no other. Each is divided into three- to four-day segments designed for different audiences. The basis is driving and learning about the car, with an emphasis on culture and surroundings for the lifestyle journalists, on the business case for the financial press, on engineering for the hard-core motoring press and on who-knows-what? for the dealer network. It was Cape Town for the flagship Arnage T, Spain for the Continental GT coupe and, this month, the Grand Canal for the Continental Flying Spur, the four-door version of the GT.

Much as I love the nostalgic idea of the original Ask the Family, the reality was rather different. The questions were way too hard and made you feel thick even when you weren’t (Robert Robinson’s smug avuncularity served mainly to rub salt into this wound), and the families were really freaky, the parents never having had sex since their children were conceived, and the kids being the weirdy, mushroom-cropped kind who aren’t allowed to watch TV, only practise the cello and solve abstruse mathematical problems. Perhaps this is why I didn’t hate Dick and Dom’s Ask the Family (BBC2, weekdays) nearly as much as I hoped I would.

When Henry Moore wanted to make clear that he thought Eric Gill’s sculpture dull and unadventurous, he compared it to knitting. Times have changed, and knitting has become worryingly fashionable, hence the Crafts Council’s delightful exhibition Knit 2 Together. There is, however, a strange feeling of déjà vu about all this. Remember the barefoot California boy Kaffe Fassett, dubbed by Sir Roy Strong the ‘genius of the knitting needle’? There was a knitting renaissance back in the 1980s. Fassett had plenty of imitators with the result that a small knitwear business or an exciting yarn shop came to epitomise the brighter side of Mrs Thatcher’s enterprise culture. But fashion is fickle.

On the whole, Radio Four has had some good controllers over the years, the better ones being those who introduced gradual change. The two who were the least successful in my view both tried to rearrange the furniture after moving in; I’m thinking of Ian McIntyre in the late 1970s who, one felt, wanted to return radio to the 1950s, and, in the 1990s, James Boyle, who, enslaved by focus groups, brought in many pointless changes. He was succeeded by the successful Helen Boaden and last year Mark Damazer replaced her. Wisely, perhaps, he hasn’t said much about his plans for the network, though he does have a few in mind.

John Virtue (born 1947) is the sixth National Gallery Associate Artist. A great deal of fuss is being made of the exhibition which marks his two-year period in residence in a basement studio. On display are the 11 new paintings he has made, several of them vast, and the show spills out from the Sunley Room into the adjacent corridors and galleries. The accompanying catalogue is a very plush affair, published in hardback (special exhibition price £12.95) and containing essays by the historian Simon Schama, Paul Moorhouse of the Tate and Colin Wiggins of the National Gallery. The current issue of Modern Painters magazine carries a laudatory article about Virtue by the National’s director, Charles Saumarez Smith.